China says it is planning to bring a safe nuclear power plant
that will not suffer from meltdowns online in November 2017. It would be
the world’s first high-temperature, gas-cooled pebble-bed nuclear plant
built on an industrial scale.

China’s Nuclear
Engineering Construction Corporation wants to introduce a high
temperature, pebble-bed, gas-cooled nuclear reactor, in the Shandong
Province, south of the capital, Beijing. The company is planning to
bring twin 105-megawatt reactors —so-called Generation IV reactors that would be immune to meltdown—would
be the first of their type built at commercial scale in the world. It is hoped that the power station will start working by
November 2017.

Construction of the plant is nearly complete, and the next
18 months will be spent installing the reactor components, running
tests, and loading the fuel before the reactors go critical in November
2017, said Zhang Zuoyi, director of the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology,
a division of Tsinghua University that has developed the technology
over the last decade and a half, in an interview at the institute’s
campus 30 miles south of Beijing. If it’s successful, Shandong plant
would generate a total of 210 megawatts and will be followed by a
600-megawatt facility in Jiangxi province.

Beyond that, China plans to
sell these reactors internationally; in January, Chinese president Xi
Jinping signed an agreement with King Salman bin Abdulaziz to construct a
high-temperature gas-cooled reactor in Saudi Arabia.
“This technology is going to be on the world market
within the next five years,” Zhang predicts. “We are developing these
reactors to belong to the world.”

Pebble-bed reactors that use helium gas as the heat
transfer medium and run at very high temperatures—up to 950 °C—have been
in development for decades. The Chinese reactor is based on a design
originally developed in Germany, and the German company SGL Group is
supplying the billiard-ball-size graphite spheres that encase thousands
of tiny “pebbles” of uranium fuel.

Seven high-temperature gas-cooled reactors
have been built, but only two units remain in operation, both
relatively small: an experimental 10-megawatt pebble-bed reactor at the
Tsinghua Institute campus, which reached full power in 2003, and a
similar reactor in Japan.

During a recent visit to the Tsinghua facility,
technologists were testing the huge helium blower that will circulate
the gas coolant at the Shandong site once it starts up. Such
high-temperature reactors are immune to meltdown because they don’t
require elaborate external cooling systems of the sort that failed at
Fukushima, Japan, in 2011.

The graphite coating protects the fuel from
breaking down, even at temperatures well beyond those found in the
reactor core during operation, and once the interior temperature passes a
certain threshold, the nuclear reactions slow, cooling the reactor and
making it essentially self-regulating. And while pebble-bed reactors do
not totally solve the problem of nuclear waste, the fuel’s form also
gives rise to multiple options for waste disposal. China’s eventual goal
is to eliminate or greatly reduce waste by recycling the spent fuel.

One of the main hurdles to building these reactors is
the cost of the fuel and of the reactor components. But China’s sheer
size could help overcome that barrier. “There have been studies that
indicate that if reactors are mass-produced, they can drive down costs,”
says Charles Forsberg, executive director of the MIT Nuclear Fuel Cycle Project. “The Chinese market is large enough to make that potentially possible.”

Graphite pebble for reactor / Wikipedia

Several other advanced-reactor projects are under way
in China, including work on a molten-salt reactor fueled by thorium
rather than uranium (a collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory,
where the technology originated in the 1960s), a traveling-wave reactor
(in collaboration with TerraPower, the startup funded by Bill Gates),
and a sodium-cooled fast reactor being built by the Chinese Institute
for Atomic Energy.High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor (HTGR)
In
August, China announced it intended to build a hybrid fusion-fission
reactor capable of recycling nuclear waste by 2030, which would make
energy production more environmentally-friendly.
Researchers
believe that hybrid reactors will be able to generate twice as much
electricity as current reactors. These reactors are also believed to be
safer as they can be immediately halted by cutting the external power
supply.
Current reactors use only fission technology, which means
dividing atoms in half while future fusion-fission technology will merge
two atoms in one.